READING # I: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEACHING AND LEARNING Learning, can take many forms. We can lear facts: learning that Paris is the capital of France, for example; or that gases expand when heated. Then again, we can learn how to do something, how to type or ride a bicycle, for example, Leaming how to and learning that are quite different kinds of learning, Learning how to requires firsthand expenence. You cannot learn to type without putting your hands on a typewriter This type of learning is sometimes called learning from hands-on experience, Learning a series of facts, on the other hand, engages our cognitive powers and memory. A third type of learning results from consciousness raising, learning how to think about familiar things in a different way or from a different point of view. Learning to teach English , for example, consists mainly of this third type of learning Learning a language obviously involves all of these kinds of leamiing, But itis not as simple as the examples above might suggest. We can learn facts: chien in French means dog in English ‘This seems to be a fairly concrete fact. But there are also rules to be learnt: the third person singular verb in English takes an -s at the end in the Simple Present Tense. Rules are general principles and they often have exceptions. When learning a language, memorizing facts is not enough: we also have to learn how to do things (learning skills). In order to pronounce sounds correctly, we have to practice them ourselves. This is perhaps a fairly mechanical skill, similar 10 earning how to type or use a computer. But there are more complex types of ‘learning how to” Leaming how to answer a telephone call in English cannot be done mechanically. Any type of conversation is unpredictable: we cannot predict what the other person is going to say. In short, learning a language consists of learning facts about the language, learning how to perform ‘mechanical skills and learning how to behave in certain situations, as well as many other types of learning, It is a highly complex type of learning. Now to return to the topic of this section, if we think carefully we will see that teaching does not bear a direct relationship to learning. We can communicate information to our students, but ‘we cannot predict what they will retain. We can get our students to use English in class, but we cannot predict what they will do when they have to use English outside the class under normal conditions. Learning a language, as we know, is a slow and steady process. Individual students ‘will learn at their own pace and in their own way. Students do not only leam from teachers: they learn from the textbook, they learn from anything they read or hear in English, whether this is an article in a newspaper, a talk on the radio or television, or a film in English, they also learn a lot from each other. There is evidence that interaction between students in the classroom is a valuable source of input for language learning Seen ffom this point of view, teaching a language is obviously much more than communicating what we know to our students. And Jearning a language is an active process, in which the student searches for information, analyzes the language, monitors his own performance and utilizes feedback to improve his understanding, of the language system, If transmitting information to the students is not the main role of the teacher, what is the teacher's role ? This will be considered in the topic of the final section of this module: the role of the student and the teacher in the learning process.